I'm Baaa-aaack

Milkman's here!

Most rickshaws are now motorized, but not all



This is a typical vendor's cart

It's very common to see up to 4 people on a scooter. The driver has a helmet but usually not the passengers!

Woman carrying load on head

Ok, so I'm back from India after my less than a week jaunt. Not feeling so great today but this too, shall pass. Here are a few pix and journal entries from the trip.

My route took me from St. Louis to Newark, and then from Newark to New Delhi. On the way to Newark, I saw something I had never seen before and did not know existed: a 360° rainbow! As we were flying along, I looked out the window, and saw it against a cloud. At first I thought I was seeing things. As the clouds came and went, it became more and more clear. The colors were the same as in every other rainbow, but there was a dark area in the middle of it. As we passed by one particularly close cloud, I realized that the dark spot was the very clear shadow of the plane. It was so beautiful!

We went to a restaurant for lunch and having been told that Indians make better Chinese food than the Chinese, we had to try some--and it was actually pretty good. We ordered spring rolls, fried rice, and honey chicken. They gave us way too many spring rolls and too much fried rice--a little communication problem there. So we asked for take home boxes, which apparently was a foreign concept. They ended up giving us foil bags tied with rubber bands. We made it back to the hotel with it!

Chickpeas (garbanzo beans) and lentils seem to be everywhere, and everything is spicy, spicy, spicy. One dish I particularly like is called Chole, which is chickpeas in a spicy chili sauce. I had it for breakfast at the hotel (I stayed at the Crowne Plaza in Gurgaon), along with carrots and peas, and grean beans with onions. They had bacon and eggs, which I tried one morning, but those were very different than what you would get in America (not bad, just different).

One of the men living on “Bechtel Street” had taken some of the broken bricks lying on the side of the road (demolition in Delhi results in discarded materials being disposed not in dumpsters but in piles dumped on the road) and constructed himself a little red brick oven on the side of the road. He had some kind of sausages he was cooking on demand. I saw those same sausages sitting in an open wrapper on top of the oven at lunch time, and they appeared to still be sitting there when we left at 6 p.m. Unrefrigerated, of course, in 95-degree weather. Yikes!

When I arrived at the airport, two guards met us at the entrance to the airport itself. The one speaking with my traveling companion looked at his documents and let him right through. However the one speaking with me insisted on seeing my ticket. I explained I didn’t have a ticket, that I was booked electronically, and needed to go into the airport to get the boarding pass. He asked for my “printout”, so I dug around in my briefcase and thankfully came up with my itinerary. He then studied it and studied it. Finally the other guard started speaking to him, and there seemed to be some unresolved question. Their discussion went on for about two minutes. Finally, he closed my passport very slowly, and handed it to me very slowly, as if I was some suspicious character. The other guard seemed to be telling him it was ok, but he wasn’t buying it. As we were leaving, they told us the Continental counter wouldn’t be open for another hour, which made no sense, and turned out to be wrong, it was in fact open. As we walked up, another set of guards asked us for passports again, so we displayed them again, and got a whole host of questions, far beyond the usual “has anyone asked you to carry anything for them” type. Then we got to the counter itself, showed the passports for a third time and endured more questions. We left the counter and went to the immigration line, where we had to show them again just to get in line, and then again at the immigration counter. After getting through immigration, we had to show them again to Customs, again to Continental at the gate counter, again to Continental at the boarding gate, and one final time to Continental at the door to the plane. My poor passport is worn out!